Of Farmer's Market Love

I knew my readers would share the Goodwill love with me! I have found so many wonderful things that I don't dare go unless I am prepared to purchase!

I got to spend an hour or two at another of my favorite places last weekend. John and I took the boys to Asheville to see some friends and took the opportunity to go to the Western NC Farmer's Market. Ever since my first visit, sometime in my childhood, I have loved this place. Long before we began to ask where our food comes from, and how it is treated, and how we can support the communities we live in or near, I instinctively loved the bins full of gorgeous produce, that moved in turn from the greens and berries of spring through the squash and beans and tomatoes of summer toward the pumpkins of fall. I loved the conversations over scale and cash register-- the neighbors meeting up with each other, the light through jars of honey and the peaceful saunter through the buildings.

I had visited our very local farmer's market with my sister, and stocked up on butter and beans and the first of the summer squash, so my spree was mostly visual. I bought what must be the last of the strawberries and a cloth sack of grits. (After a long learning curve, I can make lovely creamy grits.) But everywhere there were still delights-- herb plants growing in profusion, buckets of sunflowers and foxgloves, and something else. Something about feeling a foundation of reason and sense and mindfulness grow under what I had already appreciated and respected without being able to help it. And if our travels this summer take us back up that way, I'll be there again.